Saw an ad on TV last night for a new plasma TV with a built in high-definition tuner. Normally you have to have an external set top box (STB) and run a cable from it to the TV. If said TV is thin and hanging on your wall - TV as moving painting - these cables are quite unsightly.
Hence the ad shows the cable fading away to reveal just the TV on the wall. The slogan appears: “cables suck”.
Err so this TV has no power or aerial? I mean both of those babies need cables.
So to achieve the view as seen on the ad, you must hide the power and aerial cables in conduits inside the wall cavity. Where you could also hide the STB cable.
I heard yesterday that the number of broadband Internet users in Australia is now about the same as pay TV users. The key fact is that it’s taken only a few years for broadband to hit that number. It’s taken pay TV a lot longer to get there.
Pay TV numbers are quite stagnant. Broadband usage has exploded; particularly over the last 12 months.It’s not hard to see why. It’s the money.
The ‘dollars per hour’ of usage (entertainment?) for Broadband has plummeted over the last few years. Pay TV, being an effective monopoly, doesn’t have such competitive forces driving prices down and value up.
But it wont be long before we can get TV over Broadband. Unless they do some hard thinking to meet this challenge, Pay TV will lose. Big time.
Now that the AFL has given Channels 10 and 7 the go ahead to offer a joint bid, can the consortium ask for all 8 games?
It would make life interesting if they offered a sweetener; to show Friday night games live into Queensland and New South Wales. This has been a long-held dream of the AFL.
In turn this would make life difficult for Foxtel; what ‘added-value’ could they bring if all 8 games are on free to air.
Then there’s the ’spare’ capacity of digital (free to air) TV. Can it be used for lesser games? Mmm. More on this later.
Recently a friend - and fellow movie buff - asked me to name my favourite film of all time. After giving my answer- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - I got to thinking about the polar opposite. Films I didn’t like - in fact films I’ve walked out of.
The list isn’t that big and there’s one I remember leaving, but can’t even recall it’s name. Must have left a good impression.
- 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) - Spanish queen with an American accent?
- Nixon (1995) - I fell asleep. It seemed to be recreating his career in real time.
- Bad Lieutenant (1992) - think I walked out. This film had no redeeming features.
Update! Update! I remembered some key elements of the film whose title I’d even forgotten. A quick search at IMDB showed it to be The Rules of Attraction (2002)
The Age, actually the Livewire section of the Green Guide, today published an article of mine about using squashing down digital TV recordings to save disk space. It’s called Crush and Burn and I’m very happy with it.
From a reliable source. That would be a dentist. The Ancient Egyptians had two main cures for toothache way back around 1500 BCE.
Cure 1: Oil of Cloves (still used today)
Cure 2: Cut a live mouse in half, longways. Place one half in each cheek and ta da. Toothache - and, I’d argue half your stomach contents - gone. (may not be used much today)
I arrived at the ground late due to the kids and as we walked past a radio an announcer said “so that makes it seven goals four to nothing”. I stopped and nearly turned to go home until he mentioned that it was the blues who were zero. It was a bit weird arriving at a game that was already over but I enjoyed the last three quarters. I can’t remember the last time we beat one of the big three (blues, magpies, bombers) by more than forty points let alone eighty.
Besides Coughlan who was sensational the stars of the day were in the backline. Despite that 7.4 – 0.2 score line at quarter time we only had two more inside fifties. It just seemed like every time they bombed it in one of Kellaway, Newman or Gaspar would take a mark. Then up the other end our guys were just too tall on occasions and as a result they didn’t pay any attention to two small guys in Brown and Krakouer. At one stage Brown took the ball out of Houlihan’s hands, strolled to the fifty metre line on the boundary on the wrong side for a left footer and he slotted it through. That was the point where I think all the Richmond supporters stopped worrying about any fight back.
Continue reading “Weekend (Tigers!)”
So you are out with people of age 30+ or even 30++ You’ve had enough Bundys to feel relaxed and less tentative when it comes to matters of a dancing nature.
What songs seem to take your feet and by remote control, drag them - and hence your torso et al - up to the dance floor?
Some starters, in random order:
- Goodby T’ Jane - Slade
- Twist and Shout - Beatles
- Friday on My Mind - Easybeats
- Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley
- Better the Devil You Know - Kylie
- Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
